


Applications of Cryptology: Or a Logical Approach to Love

by Perfect_Square



Series: Applications of Cryptology: Or a Logical Approach to Love [1]
Category: Star Trek: The Original Series
Genre: Multi
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-06-05
Updated: 2018-06-05
Packaged: 2019-05-18 15:25:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 473
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14855333
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Perfect_Square/pseuds/Perfect_Square
Summary: Spock gets it in xir head to implement an ancient earth approach to dating after reading a 21st century crypotological paper on "the Dating Problem".





	Applications of Cryptology: Or a Logical Approach to Love

**Author's Note:**

> This story is inspired by the wonderful MIT paper entitled: Solving the Dating Problem with the SENPAI protocol. Please check it out. It’s real and it’s great. 
> 
> Brief summary of the MIT paper as is relevant to this fic, if you don’t want to read it yourself (which is your loss honestly): it’s embarrassing and suboptimal to reveal you have a crush on somebody if they don’t like you back. In fact, the only information you need is if you have a mutual crush or not. Using cryptography, it’s possible to securely determine and output that result given each individual encodes their personal information in (what I think is) a private key. That is each individual encodes the binary information crush or not crush on a particular individual. Revealing that you want to run the protocol with a particular person inevitably also reveals the crush, therefore it is necessary to run the protocol among a group of people including those whom you are not interested in. However, running the protocol on large groups of people is computationally prohibitive as the operational cost increases proportionally to n^2. The protocol will output results for each mutual crush. In the case of multiple mutual crushes for a single individual, polyamory is recommended. 
> 
> Further note, given the enterprise supercomputers, they probably could just run the protocol for all 422 crew-members if they wanted to, but I wanted to think about how the operational cost could be minimized—which is kind of stupid story telling wise (and in retrospect contains it's own operational cost), but bitch I wrote it for free.

According to Spock’s research Valentine’s day is a western earth cultural holiday used to celebrate romantic partners and to encourage single individuals to put forth energy to seek out a satisfactory mate. It is also an ideal time, Spock deduces, to perform the eminently logical SENPAI Dating protocol outlined in the 21st century cryptological paper titled “Solving the Dating Problem with the SENPAI protocol”. 

The trouble of course is participation and the excessive expected run time of the protocol for 422 crew members. However, Spock expects xe can cut the run-time considerably by pre-emptively eliminating matches. Logically, those individuals who can not reliably identify each other by name would not harbor mutual crushes on each other, nor would they take offense at such. Spock considers a face-name-matching program, however there are five blind crew-members aboard and an unknown quantity of crew-members with varying degrees of face-blindness. Spock makes a mental note to write an algorithm using name-to-face matching, name-to-voice matching, and name to rank-and-position matching as alternate options. 

That should cut the run time considerably, and yet Spock imagines it will still be quite excessive. At this stage, Spock’s algorithm will ask participants to voluntarily dismiss candidates that they feel no shame admitting they have no more than a professional relationship with. 

Spock expects such a step will be necessary to deal with the issue of senior bridge crew whom are expected to both know and be known by the entirety of the crew. Xe, xemself would successfully identify any and all crew members by any of xir’s matching tests—and could list them individually without aid. However, for xir’s own purposes xe needs only about 15 matches for the appropriate plausible deniability. 

Spock briefly contemplates human sexuality. Xe had considered it briefly in xir’s analysis of participation—non-single people and aromantic people being unlikely to participate in such an event (polyamourous people and grey-aros not-withstanding.) But that aside, including a brief check box for orientation—given the preponderance of monosexuality in the human species—ought to reduce the computational run-time considerably. 

Still, perhaps it would be best for Spock to include a match limit. It would not do to underestimate the enterprise crew. Even though xe expects a maximum of 246 participants and a maximum of 12,343 matches to run the protocol on. It would not do to underestimate the necessary run-time and thus interfere with the computers use for scientific exploration.  
Spock will code the limit in as a variable (which xe would have done anyway) but expects that this variable will likely be one xe changes in accordance to whatever Captain Kirk establishes is best. 

Spock allows xemself a smile. All the planning is done, and xe can practically see the design forming under xir fingertips. Xe finetunes xir mental algorithm, and once done finally begins writing the program. 


End file.
